Document processing has virtually revolutionized the way society generates paper. Typical prior art document processing systems run on top of operating systems, such as DOS or OS/2. More recently, these document processing systems have been designed to run in a Windows environment. Many of these document processing systems are commercially available.
While these document processing systems have vastly improved the ability to process documents and text, there is great inconsistency among document processors with respect to the particular methodologies of these processing. The result of these inconsistencies creates problems for both application developers and users of the applications.
Application developers must continuously "reinvent the wheel" when creating a new document processor. While operating systems and interface programs provide some tools which may be used, the great majority of the design process for a particular document processor is directed toward creating a group of processing modules which cooperate to allow the user to process documents. Application developers often design processing modules which have already been developed by another company. This requires great duplication of effort, and requires each developer to deal with the details of how to implement various desired functions.
Application users run into other problems. While particular functions may be present in one application, they may be lacking in another. Or a function available in one application may be slightly varied in another, either in use or in performance. For example, a function in application A may require certain user interaction and input to activate the function, while a similar function in application B may require a slightly varied, or totally different, user interaction and input.